Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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de Clichy. “He was surrounded by a swarm of poor Spanish painters, who sat on the floor eating and talking. He painted two or three pictures a day, wore a top hat just as I did and spent his evenings behind the scenes in the music-halls of those days, drawing portraits of the stars.” They shook hands, smiled repeatedly, and then, being unable to communicate, shook hands again. Jacob examined the canvases—Picasso had already painted scores since his arrival—and more Spanish friends appeared. Presently formality died away; someone cooked a dish of beans and they sat about in the dust, eating them. Dinner being over, they all of them, except for Picasso, who had no gift in that direction, uttered sounds intended to represent an orchestra playing Beethoven. The next day Picasso and his friends returned the call, flooding into Jacob’s little room on the Quai aux Fleurs: after a long, long time some of the Spaniards went away; Manyac, the interpreter, fell asleep; and Picasso and Jacob, left to themselves, gazed at the Daumiers, the Gavarnis, and the Dürer woodcut on the walls. In some way Picasso conveyed his wish to hear Jacob’s poetry, and he listened to it for what was left of the night. At dawn they separated, and Jacob gave Picasso the Daumiers, the Gavarnis, and the Dürer.
They saw a great deal of one another after that, although Picasso was working at his usual steam-engine pace: sometimes they used Oller’s pass to go to places such as the Moulin Rouge where Picasso not only enjoyed himself but also stored up material for one side of his painting. Yet this second Paris was not all success or the promise of success, not all this new friendship and wandering about the brilliant town by night. Among other things, Picasso’s relationship with Manyac was turning sour. Few men can successfully mix business and friendship: and perhaps one has to be a creative artist to live in close proximity with another, if indeed it is possible at all, creative artists being so very often, and perhaps necessarily, the most selfish and exigent of men. Picasso’s was a naturally dominant personality; his life was irregular even for a Spaniard; his habits squalid; the flat exceedingly small. Envahissant has often been used in connection with him, a word for which the English “encroaching” or “overwhelming” are inadequate approximations. For some years he used to summer with friends of the present writer in a town where many Spaniards lived, most of them Republican refugees: he would walk about in the afternoon, often meeting with old acquaintances or making fresh ones, and his hostess never knew whether there would be five for dinner or twenty-five, nor whether they would sit down at eight o’clock or eleven. However, she and her husband had a very great affection for Picasso, a deep respect for his painting, and they were perfectly happy to suit their ways to his. Manyac was made of less noble stuff, and presently he began to resent this influx of friends, the virtual annexation of his home.
But the merchant was of little importance compared with the shade of Casagemas. Picasso was living within a few paces of the café where his friend had killed himself (he painted its interior); the studio that Nonell had lent them was only just round the corner; Pichot and Germaine were always in view; and Picasso could scarcely go to a single place in the Paris he knew that was not haunted by the poor tortured suicide.
In the late, dead season of the year Sabartés arrived in Paris, solely with the idea of following Picasso. Many things astonished him—the lightless sun like an orange through the fog, the sight of Picasso waiting for him at the station although it was only ten in the morning, an unheard-of hour for him to get out of bed. But he was still more astonished when Picasso took him back to the boulevard de Clichy and showed him his recent painting.
It had changed entirely. There were, to be sure, pictures in what might be called his Toulouse-Lautrec manner, which had begun during his earlier visit—pictures such as the sumptuous ram-you-damn-you harlot in her high collar of jewels or the delightfully perverse “Jeune Femme” with auburn hair and a vast complicated hat—but others at first glance seemed to have no connection with the Picassos that Sabartés had known in Barcelona. There were several Maternities, grave, somber studies of the ancient theme, one at least of the most poignant beauty; there were the fierce, brilliantly-colored pictures that resulted from the fusion of Picasso’s own vision, or rather one of his visions, with that of van Gogh, whom Picasso specifically named to Roland Penrose as the strongest influence on him in 1901, and it is most probable that the “Dwarf Dancing-Girl” was among them; portraits, such as those of Coquiot, as variegated as playing-cards; there were Harlequins already, those sad, lonely figures in the outsider’s uniform that were to haunt his work, his private mythology, for so many, many years; there were paintings of Casagemas alive and dead, of mourners at an open coffin, and among the studies a limp, drooping nude that he afterwards used to place around one of his rare drawings of Christ crucified; there was an ambitious great picture sometimes called the “Evocation” and sometimes the “Burial of Casagemas”; there was Casagemas himself, seen close to, in his coffin with a huge radiant “van Gogh” candle burning beside him; and then, as from another world entirely, an impressionistic boulevard de Clichy; a girl standing in a hip-bath in his room (it has a Toulouse-Lautrec poster on the wall, probably stolen from a hoarding while the paste was still wet) sponging herself in a flood of light; and a most satisfying still-life, as deeply satisfying as a Cézanne: but above all, Picasso’s universe had been invaded by the color blue.
Blue was nothing new to Picasso: “Blue, so full of grace” was the color he loved best, although in early days he did not use it a great deal; and only recently, in Spain, he had turned to it more frequently. Indeed, it is likely that he had already painted his entrancing blue nude with long black hair and her hands open in offering before he came to Paris in 1901. But his friend had not particularly noticed the beginnings of the new trend, and now he was amazed to find that this blue, or rather a slightly colder blue, was drowning all the other colors: the earlier Casagemas of this year came from the brilliant, varied palette Picasso was using in the summer of 1901; the later head was drained of vividness; and with the “Burial” Picasso was fully into that stage soon to be called his Blue Period.
It is a strange picture, full of private symbolism, and it was the result of much thought: Picasso had already made the first studies for it before leaving Spain. It is composed in three tiers, connected by a rising helix: below, in the right-hand foreground, the door of a funeral-vault stands open; the corpse in its shroud and the mourners, all cold blue or touched with green, are grouped about it; they are deeply grieved and two stand locked in one another’s arms (Picasso had studied this attitude closely during the last years in pictures with titles such as “The Embrace”). From the mourners one’s eye rises to the middle plane, where a bowed figure from one of his Maternities, a blue-cloaked woman carrying a baby, walks on cloud, preceded by two running children: behind her and in a somewhat different focus, outside the rising spiral, stand two nudes, while before her and in much the same relation, three whores, naked but for their striped colored stockings, look up towards the highest plane, where a white horse carries a dark-clothed man up and up into whiter clouds. His arms are stretched out as stiffly as though he were nailed to a cross and a naked woman clings about his neck, pressing her head to his.
Analysts, iconographers, and art-historians have written a great deal about this picture, naming the various influences—El Greco, Redon, Cézanne—that they detect, pointing out the religious, profane, and psychoanalytic symbols as they understand them, and trying to give a coherent literary interpretation of the whole: if industry and erudition could command success Picasso’s statement would now be devoid of mystery. If he had given the picture a title their task would have been easier; but he hated doing any such thing. He hated mixing two entirely different kinds of language, and nearly all the titles given to his pictures were invented by merchants or critics or, as in the case of the “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” by friends. And it is not impossible that this absence of titles may also in some degree be due to his reserve, his secrecy, and his dislike of being penetrated. However, the one point upon which all agree is that this picture and those which followed it show Picasso’s deep concern with Casagemas; and it is worth pointing out that in his essay on Picasso Jung speaks of the blue and of the figures that peopled his world during this period as symbols of his “descent into Hades, into the unconscious, and of a farewell to the upper world.”*
In a sense this may well be so. But superficially at least Picasso was capable of abrupt changes of mood and of great cheerfulness in company: life was